Things I Have Done
by Darth Videtur
Summary: After a mission to Naboo goes terribly wrong, Anakin tries to pick up the pieces of his shattered life. In the process, he walks a fine line between his duties as a Jedi and his emotions as a man. There is someone that he thinks can help him. (Slash)


**This AU that wouldn't leave me alone is going to be posted non-chronologically by the chapters, at least at first, so it will jump around in time as snippets of the same galaxy. I missed writing Palpakin! And maybe I just needed some Palpakin angsty fluff...haha! :D**

Things I have Done

Anakin shuddered when he woke up for the third time in a row in the Chancellor's bed, unable to sleep for the nightmarish images that superimposed themselves behind his eyelids at night. Images of things he had done, places he had been, all for the Republic and none for his mortal soul. Worst of all were the dreams of _her_ , endless and repeating and filled with despair. He sighed and stared at the ceiling. In ways the memories were a thousand times worse than the visions, because he had lived through the memories and could never unwind the threads of pain and guilt that he wasn't good enough, he was never good enough…

"Anakin?"

The Jedi Knight turned his shaggy head and came nose to large nose with the sleepy Chancellor. Palpatine blinked wearily at him. "Anakin, what are you doing up?"

"Just thinking."

Palpatine chuckled softly and tapped his forehead with one long finger. "Sometimes I wonder where you go when you think, Anakin."

"Lots of places," Anakin said, reaching out to capture the slender pale hand between his own. He studied them together, tan and pale, large and small, calloused and tender, natural and manicured. Opposites in almost every way. It made Anakin love him all the more, because he _wasn't_ Anakin. "But this is my favorite place, in bed with you."

Palpatine laughed, and the soft pleasure sent Anakin's darkest memories fleeing into the background of the night's mists. "You clearly haven't been to that many places, then, my friend."

The Jedi propped himself up on his elbows. "Hold on, don't say things like that, sir."

Palpatine sighed and rolled onto his back, slipping free of Anakin's grip. "And you can probably stop calling me 'sir,' too. It feels rather, well, superficial considering our present circumstances." He waved his freed hand languidly in the air, over them both and the bed with scarlet sheets.

Anakin shook his head. He couldn't imagine calling Palpatine by some pet name, like average people did in average beds. "Then what am I supposed to call you… sir?"

The older man flicked his eyes over to take him in, their strange pale blue depths slowly growing more alert as he wakened fully. "I take it 'Palpatine' does not suit your purposes?"

Anakin's nose wrinkled in obvious dismay, teasing a small laugh from his companion. "Everyone calls you that. Well, Chancellor Palpatine, or just Palpatine. I don't want to call you what everyone else calls you. It makes me think of the Senate, of boring meetings when all I want to do is spirit you away from your handlers and do some handling of my own."

For a moment, Palpatine was quiet as he stared at the ornate ceiling of his bedroom. Finally, a low sigh. "They could offer you the galaxy, and you would still desire more, I think."

Somehow, from him, it almost sounded like a compliment. Anakin had learned enough decorum to feel a twinge of shame, and he fixed his gaze on the sheets. Of course, the chancellor would find this very forward and inappropriate. Sometimes he still suspected that Palpatine even second-guessed their relationship. He remembered the months of courting and near-begging before Palpatine had let him anywhere near his bed or body. Did he push him too hard, even then? Did Palpatine think he was only wanting to rebound from the complete despair of losing? _I can't live with a dead wife, sir. Please. You've helped me before. Help me now._

That was Anakin's problem; he never knew when enough was enough, and Palpatine was altogether too kriffing polite to call him out on his bantha poodoo. Well, most of the time. He looked over. The politician was smiling, the sharp line of his mouth quirked more to one side than the other.

"That's not a bad thing, Anakin."

"What?"

"Wanting the galaxy. More. Less. Wanting. " He waved his hand again to frighten away the instinctive fear of his words. His long fingers looked like they were conducting only music he could hear. Anakin watched, spellbound.

"I'm not, not supposed to want anything, sir. Jedi Knights don't need things."

"Ambition is a necessary part of our human lives, Anakin. Without ambition, we wither and stagnate."

Was it bad that his mind immediately went to the Jedi High Council? Anakin dropped his gaze, but not before he caught a conspiratorial twist to those perfect lips. There was no way Palpatine could tell what he was just thinking, but still…

"I understand, sir."

"Do you?"

He met the older man's piercing curiosity head-on. "Admiral Tarkin and I talked about this once, how you have to want victory to get it. If you don't want it, you won't get it. Sometimes… sometimes I think the Jedi…" It felt like treachery to say such things out loud.

"Don't want to win?" Palpatine finished his thought for him.

Anakin hurried to explain. "I'm not saying they aren't loyal!"

"Of course not." The Chancellor shifted on the bed and finally sat up, smoothing the rumpled edge of his nightshirt down. Anakin restrained a flinch. He hadn't meant to wake Palpatine; the Chancellor got little enough sleep as it was, and this was even supposed to be a holiday for him. It was barely light outside! Palpatine glanced at the chronometer and ran a hand through his silver hair. Anakin admired the sight, one of his favorite moments of waking up with the politician was seeing the unkempt state of his normally impeccable hair. It made him real in a way Anakin could understand, for just a moment in time.

Palpatine folded the covers down, as fastidious as ever, and slid from the bed into his slippers and an outer robe. Anakin watched him and thought that the Chancellor must be the only human to wear almost as many layers to bed as he did to work. Was it a Naboo thing? He thought of Padmé's soft skin bare under the covers and shook his head. Not Naboo then, but the memory of her brought the sadness back to his soul, the empty aching pain that couldn't be completely filled even two years after… after...

"Anakin?"

He forced the pain low and lifted his head. "I'm sorry, sir, I was thinking of her again."

Palpatine's watery eyes softened, and he nodded. "I see. We… we all miss her dearly, of course, but you especially, my friend. Your wife sacrificed herself to save her people, there is no nobler act than this, Anakin."

Anakin nodded. "I know…"

Palpatine looked across the room to the window. "Do not fear to grieve for her. And the doctor responsible lies dead at your hands."

"I, I shouldn't feel good about that. It wasn't right, what I did." He said it, and still the hot rage burned his soul like the boiling black pitch of Watto's shop lanterns used to burn his hands. _Not right, but just. Not good, but done._ "It… it wasn't right."

"So say the Jedi, the Jedi who don't want to win."

Anakin looked at him and forced an awkward low laugh, pushing her from his thoughts as Obi-Wan had taught him. He could grieve again in private later, when he didn't have the elegant Chancellor to burden with his own demons."I should probably explain what I meant by that, sir."

"May I?" Palpatine asked, and dumbfounded, Anakin nodded. The Chancellor crossed the short distance to a small table by the window where a steaming pot of tea and two cups sat waiting, prepared by the Chancellor's personal droid sometime earlier this morning. 11-4D or something like that… The Chancellor poured one of the cups, not wasting a drop, and carried it back to Anakin's side of the bed, pressing the warm porcelain into Anakin's large hands. Then he seated himself on the edge of the bed as though it were a grand chair in the Senate chamber.

Anakin waited respectfully for him to begin. With Palpatine, it was so easy to wait, to still his mind. When the older man spoke, he _wanted_ to listen.

"When you said the Jedi did not want to win, perhaps you meant that the Jedi Council lacks the willpower to do what must be done in the service of our Republic. And those who lack willpower cannot hope to conquer an enemy who lacks no such thing."

Anakin's fingers tightened around the cup. "You know me well, sir." _And I hardly still know you at all, though not for lack of trying._

Palpatine folded his hands in a prim triangle of long digits. "I too, feel that the Jedi are deeply constrained by the limits of their tenets, but both you and I know that will not change anytime too soon. And so the realities of war are left to those of us who must hold our ground without the aid of the Jedi's mystical Light."

Anakin agreed, it really was the people without the Force who faced the real struggle, people like his men in clone armor, the admirals and generals and even their Commander-in-Chief. He thought this in the darkest part of his mind that he could never share with Obi-Wan. Not even Ahsoka, if she still lived. Which she didn't. Poor Snips, Hero of the Blue Shadow Virus as all the other padawans remembered her now.

"Anakin?" The delicate query drew his gaze back to the present.

"You did what needed to be done, Anakin. The doctor was a danger to civilization itself. You removed a rogue cell from the body of our Republic. If the Jedi censure you for that, then… so be it." Palpatine lifted one hand in a rare gesture of wordless frustration.

Anakin felt a surge of warmth that such emotion on the Chancellor's part was for _him._ He nodded. "I guess so, Chancellor. I'm not really much of a Jedi anymore, anyway. I go on missions, I do things for the Order, but I don't feel it anymore."

Palpatine looked at him, compassionate and thoughtful. "Your time with Padmé woke you up, my friend. That _mission_ woke you up. I believe you are beginning to feel so much more than a cold, remote dogma of an ancient order, Anakin. That is your, hm, problem as the Jedi would say."

"It feels like my dream of becoming a great Jedi is just that, a dream."

"Ah. Anakin….Jedi are not the only ones who can achieve greatness."

The words stopped Anakin mid-sip of his tea, which he was finally starting to like after years of Palpatine laying it before him and insisting that it was an acquired taste. _When is he ever not right?_ He lifted his thick eyebrows at the politician and decided to play for a lighthearted jab. "Well, yeah. I'd rather have Rex and the other clones at my back than the Jedi High Council. They don't argue so much."

They laughed together, Anakin hoarse with need and sleep, Palpatine throaty with barely constrained mirth. How Anakin loved that laugh, restrained and refined like the man himself, but with an edge that no one ever uncovered fully. Who could actually say they knew the man behind the smile of the Chancellor? Maybe Anakin came the closest now, but even then Palpatine valued his airs of mystery and privacy. Like his name.

Which brought that back to the front of Anakin's mind and helped to the push the darkest ghouls away. Never forever, just for a time. A time to think. He smiled over his tea cup at the older man, and Palpatine tilted his head. "I'm not entirely certain I trust that expression, Anakin."

"She told me once that you have a first name."

Palpatine's eyes dropped, his expression bleeding dry and blank in a matter of seconds. He pushed up from the edge of the bed and glided to the window, casting over his shoulder almost like an afterthought: "Most do who come from our planet."

Anakin didn't like that. Over the years, he had well learned the shape of the Chancellor's evasive tactics. "What does it mean? 'Sheev?'"

Palpatine's hands tensed as he clasped them behind his back. "Many things, depending on who you ask. 'Mourner,' 'destroyer,' 'creator,' 'transformer.'" He shrugged to the window, and Anakin could tell that the question had bothered him by the twitch of his left fingers. "It was a name, like any other."

None of those meanings fit with the quiet, humble man in front of him.

"Sheev…." Anakin tested it on his tongue. Fitting or not, he liked it; it was simple and strong, very Naboo in style.

"It isn't necessary, Anakin," Palpatine started to say, but the young Jedi turned back the covers, unfolded his lanky body from the bed with a large smile, and came to stand beside him, gloriously and unashamedly unclothed. Anakin loved moments like this, when he struck the Chancellor speechless with his devotion, his body, his everything. He had never been shy, but for the longest time after Padme's death, it felt like treason to even look at another, much less her former mentor and his dearest friend. Obi-Wan was too much like a brother, like a father, and he didn't understand anyway.

Palpatine understood him. Palpatine listened and cared.

And when Anakin offered himself up, all of him both dark and light, and how dark he was now, Palpatine did not recoil in disgust. He accepted him, reluctant only because he thought Anakin delusional to pursue him, but Anakin never cared about things like that. Padme had been beautiful, but Padme had been an angel on the inside. Anakin cared about _people. His people._ Anakin shivered as the apartment's cool air touched his flushed skin, shivered even more when the pale blue gaze slid sideways and down him and a faint blush brushed high cheekbones.

The Chancellor looked away from him with a low sigh. "Anakin, my name is not-"

"It's beautiful," Anakin protested before he could say another word. "I don't care what it translates to. Destroyer, transformer, whatever. The meaning isn't _you._ But this…" he reached out and caught one hand, pulling it to his broad chest, pulling the Chancellor's strange eyes back to his. He looked deep and smiled. "This is you, and me, and us, Chancellor. Palpatine. Sheev."

Now it was Palpatine's turn to shiver, and he did as he glanced away over the vista of the sprawled city-planet beneath, all twinkling lights and rumbling machines.

Anakin's full lips pressed together, and he reached out and pulled the smaller man into his tight embrace. Palpatine offered only token resistance. "Forget everything but us today, Sheev."

The wiry muscles under his arms pulled taut for just a moment, and then he shivered them loose and pliant with a searing kiss, tugged a groan from deep in the other man's chest, and smiled over cool lips.

Palpatine pulled back, looked up through half-closed eyes. "Anakin…"

Anakin stepped back and pulled him to the bed.

The morning passed without a single interruption while Anakin brought all his talents to bear on the slender figure of the Chancellor until the man writhed under him and softly, wordlessly begged for more. Their coupling proved close and gentle and hesitant this time, with soft touches, careful preparation. Palpatine responded to his every movement, surrendering a nearly silent sigh when the powerful young Jedi moved the layers of robes aside and claimed his body utterly. For _him_ , Anakin moved slowly, gratefully, tenderly coaxing each exquisite whimper from parted lips. When he whispered his lover's name in his ear as they came together, when he felt the tight grip and heard the ragged gasp from the most powerful man in the galaxy now caught helpless in his arms, against his overheated skin, Anakin had never felt more alive.

Never felt more powerful.

Today, only they existed in the galaxy. As it should be, because nothing else mattered anymore.

 _1\. Okay, I was inspired today to return to my original favorite Palpatine pairing: Palpakin. :D This is probably going to turn into a series of one-shots from an AU galaxy where Padme and Ahsoka die from the Blue Shadow Virus, Anakin brutally kills the crazy doctor and steps closer to the Dark Side and almost falls as a result and Palps is there to catch him in his darkest moments. Of course, Palpatine didn't expect Anakin would take this route but he's willing to sacrifice his personal comfort if it means ensnaring the Chosen One in his future Empire._

 _2\. Anakin's walking a fine line in this AU. His loyalties lie more with the Chancellor and the Senate than with the Jedi Order, but he still carries out his missions and does what he has to do. He's going through the motions by rote, and the only time he feels alive is when he is with the one person who knows what he's been through, who understands and doesn't judge, and who represents everything the Jedi Order can't provide for him. With Palpatine he can grieve, laugh, make love, and feel anger. It's intoxicating to him, a young impulsive man who NEEDS to feel alive._

 _3\. Palpatine is really hoping all this sentimental sap is going to land him a firmly loyal apprentice for his future Empire. Who knows, maybe someday he'll come to appreciate Anakin's fluff. …not likely, lol. He'll tolerate it anyway in a corner of his black heart. ;) xD_

 _4\. So sorta I don't get some of the non-joking dislike of the name Sheev (it's so fun for memes, though! Why?). It's different from earth names, yes, but so are a lot of names in Star Wars. Anakin/Ani? Padme? Sio Bibble? Sifo-Dyas? Dooku? Ahsoka? So on and on? And Sheev/Shiva has such potential for meaning, especially considering that his dad named him that. What was his father thinking/knowing at the time, I wonder? Ooooh, spec-u-la-tion!_

 _5\. We'll see what else this AU snippet universe turns up, LOL._


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